SIN speaks to Mark Tighe, co-author of the book that tells the tale of John Delaney’s demise

Paddy Henry

Editor.sin@gmail.com

It was November 2004, FAI CEO Fran Rooney had stormed out of the organisation’s Abbotstown offices with a six-figure severance package in his back pocket, ‘My Prerogative’ by Brittney Spears was top of the Irish charts, and Brian Kerr was the man whom the Irish football faithful had trusted to bring the glory days back.

Waiting in the wings was John Delaney, a no-nonsense, business like straight talker who had made a name for himself as a media darling during the Saipan debacle of 2002.

What was to ensue over the intervening decade and a half was a reign of deceit, corruption and costly failings, leading to the near collapse of the institution charged with running one of the nation’s most popular sports.

Sunday Times journalist and former NUI Galway student Mark Tighe was instrumental in the toppling of Delaney, who left the FAI in disgrace in September 2019, exposing the Waterford man’s dodgy dealings and bringing the topic of corruption in Irish football to the top of public conversation.

Mark sat down with SIN to discuss his bestselling, tell-all book, ‘Champagne Football’, which offers a deep dive into the Delaney administration documenting the mad, bad and downright bizarre of the Delaney era.

Looking back at Delaney’s rise to prominence, Tighe recalls viewing the man with a degree of fondness, seeing the Waterford man as a move away from the amateurish leadership of the FAI hat defined previous generations,

“The 2002 World Cup was probably the first I heard of him, I was a student in DCU at the time and was aghast that Roy Keane had walked out or sent home by Mick McCarthy from that World Cup, our best player I’m a big football fan myself and John Delaney would have really came into prominence then, it’s the first time I would have seen him, I would have had a vague recollection of the night of the long knives, this thing where his father was thrown out of the FAI back in 1996, a few years after the 1994 World Cup.

“I was in college in NUI Galway in 2005/2006 doing my masters in Journalism and Delaney had just been a year in the job at that stage and initially you could see in the media coverage at the

time and there was a general consensus among a lot of people, among football people and administrators that this guy is what we need, he’s steeped in football, he’s an accountant by trade, he’s got business experience , he’s going to professionalise what had been described as an exploding clown car of an organisation where the amateur blazers kind of ran the roost and the professionalism hadn’t really seeped through in terms of how it was run.”

“He very much said I’m going to bring in these reforms post Saipan and this thing called the Genesis Report. He ensured that the players were very well treated by and large which was something that hadn’t taken place previously where you had players down the back in steerage and the honorary people would have been getting all the executive travel. So he did swap that around, he brought in some good things so initially my first impression from just following the media was that this guy was going to be good, he knows football but he also professional. “

As time passed on however it became clear to many that all was not as it seemed at the FAI. Football administrative bodies had been steeped in controversy throughout the Delaney era, from Blatter’s FIFA to Platini’s UEFA the rot of corruption began to make its way into the public consciousness. As the axe fell of footballing demagogues Delaney could not fashion an escape. It look a letter sent to The Sunday Times, containing a photocopied cheque for €100,000 between Delaney and his employers for the can of worms to truly open. Donegal man Tighe recalls his initial excitement reaction to the astonishing find.

“I was kind of excited and second guessing it at the same time, as a journalist you have to be cynical, you have to have that fear that something may not be genuine, but on that March 1st I made a lot of enquiries straight away and nobody was telling me that this was a fraudulent thing. The reaction was very much that you’ve gotten something from inside here. There’s a family law connection so straight away after all those inquiries with the FAI Press Office with Delaney’s solicitor and the FAI directly my hunch was that this was genuine and we couldn’t see if it was declared in the company accounts so we suspected that we had found that first chink.”, he said.

“There hadn’t been leaks from the FAI for many many years but there was also suspicion that there was huge problems with their finances so I was excited and I thought it was a substantial tip so as we pursued it we were quite excited , we didn’t quite know what we had but we thought it was the start of something, we didn’t know what, we didn’t expect all hell to break loose like it did , but then suddenly when Delaney was taking us down to the High Court and trying to injunct us on that St Patricks Day we knew that he had a fear about this, and he could see that there could be a lot of consequences if this saw the light of day so that became a huge moment to win

As time passed on however it became clear to many that all was not as it seemed at the FAI... As the axe fell of footballing demagogues Delaney could not fashion an escape. It look a letter sent to The Sunday Times, containing a photocopied cheque for €100,000 between Delaney and his employers for the can of worms to truly open.

that court case.

What came out of those initial findings led to the eventual toppling of Delaney’s house of cards. The reports made for grim reading. New FAI accounts had to be filed to give a true assessment of the organisation’s financial affairs under Delaney. The new accounts revealed an organisation in financial peril, with liabilities of over €55 million. Delaney’s use of the FAI’s finances to fund personal luxuries was also revealed, Mark remained gobsmacked throughout with every revolution as surprising as the next.

“It was all surprising, even as I say when a whistle-blower contacted me on the day that the story came out and I met them on the Monday, even the stuff they told me on the rent for Delaney and the credit card use and abuse and the other issues that led us on to the Susan Keegan story, I was gobsmacked, It was jaw-dropping stuff. To use FAI funds for your girlfriend or to use it on petty stuff repeatedly and all that cash withdrawals, that was just jaw-dropping!

“Even after all that and after all the madness with SportsDirect, the €6.5 million that was a loan and not a sponsorship, even after all that and the Con Martin money for the John Giles Foundation, even after all those Jaw-dropping stories to walk in in December and to get the new accounts and to show how bad it was it again we were all flabbergasted, and we were all thinking, Jesus, this keeps getting worse! So many times over that year I was just dumbstruck by what had happened and what we were uncovering and what was true and what had been hidden for so many years. Even since the book has come out, I’ve had people contacting me saying there’s other stories there, but there is so much there still.”

While never moving the focus of blame away from Delaney, Mark acknowledges that other actors were at play throughout the Delaney regime. Weak board members that allowed Delaney to rule with an iron fist and de-facto watchdogs such as the Press and Sport Ireland failed to act early enough.

“He was using the FAI’s credit card for substantial personal expenditure on stuff like Limousines, VIP airport facilities, Jewellery, Duty-Free, takeaways, Executive Dry-Cleaning so that’s petty kind of stuff but you also had larger stuff like where he was using the FAI’s resources to finance defamation cases and then he would keep all the ‘winnings’ on the settlements and there was more extraordinary payments we unearthed such as payments to his ex-girlfriend Susan Keegan. There’s only a limit to the amount of blame you can apportion to other people for that. But there’s definitely blame that people like John O’Regan down in Kerry would say who did a big splurge on Delaney that other people in the FAI failed in their jobs to police him, be it the finance department or the FAI Board and especially the people in the positions of Honorary Treasurer and Secretary and whoever the President or Chairman of the day was, they all had a responsibility to oversee what was happening with their Chief Executive and what he was doing with the FAI’s money, and then as well there were the politicians and the media and Sport Ireland who all had watchdog roles to an extent and we all could have looked harder and pushed harder before 2019.”he concluded.

‘Champagne Football: The Rise and Fall of John Delaney and the Football Association of Ireland’ by Mark Tighe and Paul Rowan is available online and at all good book shops,